What We’re Reading: Postapocalit, “Love Among the Chickens”

Notes from New Yorker staff members on their literary engagements of the week.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of postapocalit—novels set in an imaginary North American wilderness after the unthinkable happens. While the category is new, the genre isn’t; it goes back to Stephen King’s 1979 novel “The Stand,” and beyond, to sci-fi classics like “On the Beach,” “I Am Legend,” “Day of the Triffids,” “Planet of the Apes,” and the forgotten “Alas, Babylon,” by Pat Frank. The genre was revitalized by Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel “The Road,” which made postapocalit safe for serious fiction, and recent years have brought several estimable contributions to this corner of my bookshelf, including Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy, Justin Cronin’s “The Passage,” (the recently published sequel, “The Twelve,” is on my digital beside table), and Peter Heller’s wonderful “The Dog Stars,” which is my subject today.

“The Dog Stars” takes place in Colorado, nine years after a super-flu has killed ninety-nine per cent of the people on the planet. (Nuclear Armageddon, the pretext for most early postapocalit, has been largely replaced by viral plagues.) The main character, Hig, lives at an abandoned airstrip with a violent wacko named Bangley and one of the most lovable dogs in recent literature, Jasper. The story concerns their struggle for resources and survival, which pits them against various desperadoes and also leads Hig to an unlikely romance with an epidemiologist, which leavens the book’s mournful tone. “The Dog Stars” doesn’t have zombies or super-vampires in it, à la Cronin; the dangers in Heller’s world are real, and all the scarier for being so casually deadly. It also has some of the best flying scenes I’ve ever read; it’s like “Deliverance” in an airplane.

The prose bears an obvious debt to manly sentence-smiths like McCarthy, Hemingway, and Jack London, but it also has lyrical descriptions of landscape and nature reminiscent of James Dickey’s poetry. Heller is a longtime outdoors author and magazine writer, for “Outside” in particular, and he takes a “Big Two-Hearted River” approach to his nature writing, constructing the natural world block by verbal block. Indeed the book can be read not merely as a horror fantasy but as an extended allegory about climate change and environmental degradation. The elk are gone, because of some mysterious disease, and “the trout are gone every one. Brookies, rainbows, browns, cutthroats cutbows, every one,” because the creeks are too warm. Throughout the book Heller plays a wrenching minor chord of abiding loss.

I would also add, on a personal note, that it’s always exhilarating (and quite rare) to see a journalist forgo familiar ground for the uncharted territory of fiction, and make such a brilliant success of it. Because what journalist doesn’t secretly dream of doing the same?

—John Seabrook

From time to time, residents of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope assemble to do something silly that makes folks in the rest of the city, and the rest of the country, laugh and wince in equal measure. A bit of Slopenfreude comes courtesy of a recent story in the Times with the headline: “CHICKENS THREATEN TO DIVIDE BROOKLYN COMMUNITY.” In brief: organizers of a community garden have built a coop in the neighborhood to house eight hens for the winter; nearby residents claim they were not informed and say that they fear the arrival of vermin and the spread of disease. The controversy has more to do with issues of community identity and gentrification than poultry, per se, but most simply it is further evidence that amateur chicken-keeping has fully become a thing of the moment, as Susan Orlean explained in the magazine, back in 2009. It is also a reminder that chickens themselves, those curious little creatures, have an ability to ensnare their human minders in incidents of madness and farce.

A friend pointed me to this story at exactly the right time, as I had just finished P. G. Wodehouse’s “Love Among the Chickens,” a comic trifle of a novel first published in 1906, when Wodehouse was just twenty-five, and revised by the author fifteen years later to smooth out some of the rough bits and excise a tidy and rather mawkish marriage-plot epilogue. In the story, the narrator, an aimless, distracted writer named Jeremy Garnet, gets arm-twisted into joining his old friend Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge (a Wodehouse regular, making his first appearance in print) in a new venture in the Dorset countryside:

“Laddie,” said Ukridge impressively, “we are going to keep fowls.”

To that pronouncement, Garnet says that he’d not mind getting to the country to play a little golf, but pleads ignorance regarding the keeping of chickens, which Ukridge waves off in a typical bit of illogical bravado: “Excellent! You’re just the man. You will bring to the work a mind unclouded by theories. You will act solely by the light of your intelligence.”

Neither man, unsurprisingly, turns out to be the chicken savant that Ukridge imagines, and various absurdities befall the co-operative from the start. Ukridge is inattentive when ordering birds, and seems to have acquired many more cocks than hens. The fowl arrive suddenly and are homeless, leaving Garnet to improvise a set of comically shoddy coops. Most of the early days of the endeavor are devoted to chasing the birds around, as they prove more slippery and wont to escape than either man had expected.

There is something funny about chickens. (A glance through the New Yorker cartoon archives reveals the bird to be a rich comedic inspiration, with popular themes concerning road crossing, notions of free-rangedom, and the eternal question of the provenance of the chicken and the egg.) And certainly there is something very funny about men chasing them around. Perhaps it’s the undignified stoop required of the pursuer, or the bursting speed and clucking persistence of the pursued. The novel’s greatest set piece involves the escape of one chicken, dubbed Aunt Elizabeth, which Garnet describes as “a Bolshevist hen, always at the bottom of any disturbance in the fowl-run.” Garnet sets off on a long-distance cross-country chase. After a while, he closes in, only to be thwarted:

A judicious increase of pace brought me within a yard or two of my quarry. But Aunt Elizabeth, apparently distrait, had the situation well in hand. She darted from me with an amused chuckle, and moved off rapidly again up the hill.

The stalking ends when Garnet follows the hen through a hedge and spills out the other side onto a neighbor’s lawn, where he interrupts a croquet game and is introduced to a comely young woman whom he’d spotted earlier on the train, igniting the love part of the story.

Romance blooms, but the chicken business flounders. Garnet is maddened by the mounting errors, while Ukridge, the actual proprietor, remains upbeat: he is a giddy and shameless back-to-the-earther, undaunted by failure and unconcerned with success, lacking the manners even to be derided as a gentleman farmer. The novel is mostly a lark—superficial in the best, breezy sense—but it does contain a few morals for the contemporary reader who may have gazed upon the micro chicken concerns popping up on his block or in the backyard next door and mused, How hard could it be? Chickens can be willful little things, and can get you in trouble with your neighbors. In the novel, just as in Park Slope, the birds lead to climactic clash with the locals, who first view the farming operation with a bemused curiosity, but lose their patience when Ukridge wracks up large debts among the town’s merchants and shows no sign of paying them off. The lenders descend on the farm in a scene that would surely rival, in its chaos and acrimony, any concerned-citizens meeting in Brooklyn.

—Ian Crouch

Illustration by Nolan Pelletier.

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